Hoover Reservoir

At a glance

Before the lake

Long before Columbus needed the water, the valley of Big Walnut Creek was farm country. An Army Corps of Engineers survey from January 1948 found that roughly 90 percent of the basin was farmland, about 60 percent of it in crops, with corn first and wheat second among a landscape of stock raising and dairying. The Corps named Galena, population 355 in 1940, as "the only town affected by the reservoir proper."

Galena had been founded in 1809 by Gilbert Carpenter at the meeting of Big and Little Walnut creeks, and platted as Zoar in 1816 by William Carpenter. The name changed to Galena in 1834, reportedly by drawing names from a hat. A water-powered grist mill and a sawmill ran on South Columbus Street beside a tannery, with two mill races carrying water between the two creeks — one race stayed visible, according to a village history, until the city bought the land for the dam in 1956. Ed Sherman, who held a patent for covered-bridge bracing and kept his office above the tannery, built at least three covered bridges near town; two were already replaced by iron bridges in the early 1930s, and the third collapsed under a truck in the 1950s.

Upstream and around the pool's edges, county atlases from 1842 to 1945 name the farm families who worked the valley floor for a century before the city ever showed up: Curtis and Curtiss, Roberts, Williams, Smith, Dyer, Cook, Burnside, Bennett, Budd, Clapham, Sebring, McLeod and Ulrey, to name the ones that recur across generations of maps. The tiny crossroads of Maxwell (also called Maxtown, whose 1908-era name survives as GNIS's "Maxtown (historical)") had its own church, school, store and cemetery near where Maxtown Road crosses the pool today. Along the valley ran the Three-C Highway, an auto route connecting Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati that was bricked through Westerville, Galena and Sunbury in 1922-24, with Westerville holding its completion celebration on June 24, 1924.

Building the dam

Columbus turned to a dam on Big Walnut Creek only after being burned twice. The Corps of Engineers wrote that the droughts of 1934-35 and 1944-45 "demonstrated that existing storage" — the Griggs and O'Shaughnessy reservoirs on the Scioto and Olentangy — "was inadequate." The city had already resorted to an emergency quarry supply in 1945 and a temporary peaking plant on Nelson Road in 1950. Three engineering firms, including Burgess & Niple, all concluded surface storage was the answer, and an October 1947 planning conference brought Corps officers together with Mayor James A. Rhodes and city water officials; no public hearing was held.

The Corps had drawn up its own flood-control dam, but Columbus instead built a water-supply-only structure with an uncontrolled spillway, at a cost that ran to roughly $16.4 million once land, roads, bridges, cemeteries and utilities were counted. The city paid for it with council-authorized Water Works Enlargement bonds, retired from water revenues, not a public vote — Ohio law did not require one, and the Ohio Supreme Court later upheld the arrangement in a 1956 tax dispute with Delaware County.

City Council named the project the Hoover Dam and Reservoir on October 30, 1950, honoring Charles P. Hoover, then superintendent of the Division of Water and a nationally known figure in water treatment (he co-discovered lime-and-soda-ash softening and wrote a textbook that ran to seven editions), and his brother Clarence B. Hoover, who had held the same job before him. Charles died two weeks after the naming resolution passed; Clarence had died earlier that same year. The 1957 dedication plaque on the dam confirms both brothers are honored — not, as sometimes assumed, President Herbert Hoover.

Land acquisition ran from 1951 into 1957 and cost the city about $4.59 million through the end of 1955 alone. Council journals record roughly 176 named purchase ordinances between 1952 and 1957, plus 96 condemnation lawsuits covering 2,235 acres and $1.91 million in court awards. A detailed extraction of The City Bulletin's pages names 233 distinct seller groups. The biggest holdings taken, by acreage, belonged to Audrey Miley (145.66 acres, $66,000), Curtis J. Martin (134.92 acres, $93,586 by court award), Paul L. Gilmore (132.56 acres, $46,500) and Herman Morris (125.05 acres, $42,000 by court award); the largest single court awards went to Huntington National Bank as trustee ($155,000 and $84,500 on separate parcels), Curtis J. Martin, Paul Evarts and Zepha M. Nassano. Many of the families who sold in the 1950s — Bennett, Curtis, Johnson, McLeod, Roberts and Sebring among them — had held land in the same valley on every county map back to 1866.

Two cemeteries had to move. About 390 bodies were relocated from Nutt Cemetery to Burnside Cemetery, and roughly 300 graves came out of Galena Cemetery and were reburied up the hill on land the city donated. Both relocations went to Meggs & Son Funeral Home of Adams, Tennessee, for a combined appropriation of about $12,743 for the Galena work alone. Roads were rebuilt or abandoned across the valley — County Line Road, Sunbury Road, Twin Valley Road, the Africa-Big Walnut Road and the old 3-C Highway among them — under contracts let between 1954 and 1957, along with new bridges over Big and Little Walnut creeks.

Construction itself moved fast for its size. J. A. Jones Construction Co. of Charlotte, North Carolina, broke ground on March 20, 1953, when Mayor Robert T. Oestreicher climbed into an earth mover instead of using a ceremonial spade — he called it "silly to be pictured with a spade on a tremendous undertaking like this." First concrete was poured that June. Big Walnut Creek was diverted through the finished structure in June 1954, and by September 1954 its flow was "completely regulated" by the new dam. The dam was dedicated on September 23, 1955, in a steady drizzle under a tent, with water from Griggs, O'Shaughnessy and the newly filled Hoover mixed in a ceremonial "christening" by relatives of the men who had built the earlier dams, including Charles Hoover's own grandsons. About 1,000 people attended; there was no single keynote speaker, only a long list of dignitaries making short remarks, according to the next day's Dispatch. The reservoir first spilled over the top on March 2, 1956, and Hoover water reached the city's taps on June 15, 1956, when the Morse Road treatment plant — later renamed the Hap Cremean Water Plant — went into service.

Stories

The road that drowned twice

At low water on the reservoir's west shore, near where today's South Old 3C Highway dead-ends into the lake, a stretch of brick pavement with faded lane lines has surfaced during drawdowns. It is the old 3-C Highway, the Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati route that was rerouted onto a former railroad grade around 1950-51 — two years before construction even began — and then cut off for good when the pool filled in 1955. A Dispatch nature column from December 9, 1956, describes the writer driving "north along the west bank to where the old road dead-ends into the water," the earliest known mention of the flooded crossing.

A third of Galena, gone

Galena's own historical marker on Front Street records that "a third of the village was demolished" when construction began in 1953: commercial buildings that had stood on stilts along Big Walnut Creek were torn down as hazards, and numerous roads leading off the square were eliminated. Frank McMahon's blacksmith shop, the neighboring wagon and paint shops, an old creamery building and a hardware store were all taken by the city. Three covered bridges built by a local patent-holder, Ed Sherman, had already been replaced or had collapsed by the time the water came.

The Dam Church

Central College Presbyterian Church, half a mile from the new dam, earned the nickname "The Dam Church" after its minister got permission from Mayor M. E. Sensenbrenner to hold an annual Easter sunrise service atop the finished dam. News of the coming reservoir had already pushed the small congregation to enlarge its building in anticipation of new neighbors — even though, contrary to a persistent local rumor, Central College itself was never flooded.

Nine drowned on County Line Road

On the night of January 3, 1967, a car carrying Mrs. Mary Helen Rutherford, 41, her four children and four infant nieces plunged off County Line Road (Smothers Road) into 40 feet of water. All nine died — Delores Ann, 18; Bertie Marie, 15; Steven, 12; Mary Jane, 5; and the nieces Karen Sue, Sharon Lou, Lisa Ann and Teresa Lynn, all under two — in what the Dispatch called the county's worst single tragedy in a decade. Divers and a wrecker crew worked for days to recover the car and bodies.

The waterfront schoolhouse

The old Maxtown School, a pre-reservoir building on Sunbury Road, "suddenly ... was waterfront property" once the pool filled in 1955, as the Dispatch put it decades later. Bought in the early 1970s by Woodrow Macke, later an Otterbein vice president, it was converted into a private home in 1996-97 and still stands as one of the few surviving buildings from the flooded crossroads community.

A vanished car and a still-open case

In July 1996, Rob Mohney, 29, of Central College Road, left dinner at home and disappeared. His car turned up days later parked above the reservoir, possibly wiped of fingerprints. Police reopened appeals for information as recently as 2026, thirty years after he vanished, and the case remains unsolved.

The lake since

Hoover has flooded, and it has nearly run dry, more than once since 1956. The January 1959 flood remains the record downstream flow at the dam's outlet gauge, at 23,800 cubic feet per second — the largest since USGS records began there in 1938. The reservoir's own record high pool, 898.95 feet, came on January 6, 2005, when the city opened the gates overnight and evacuated about 75 homes in the Gould Park subdivision downstream; Gahanna's Creekside Park lost its walkways in the same event. The lowest recorded pool, 868.58 feet, came during a drought on March 1, 1964 — and rose more than 10 feet in a day and a half just over a week later, during the great Ohio flood of March 1964.

Drought has been a recurring theme. The dry years of 1987-88 pushed the pool to 868.82 feet and helped spur the city toward what became the John R. Doutt Upground Reservoir, completed in 2014. A 2024 flash drought again drew the pool down by roughly 10 feet, prompting the city to pump water in from Alum Creek Reservoir and release supplemental flow from the Doutt reservoir; Columbus issued its first Stage 1 water-conservation request since 2012 in June 2025.

Water quality has brought its own headaches: taste-and-odor episodes tied to algae blooms led the city to experiment with drawing water from different depths through the dam's gates starting in 2015, and 2018 brought USDA-funded farm conservation work in the watershed to cut phosphorus runoff. Fish populations have also shifted with deliberate management — blue catfish, stocked starting in 2011, have made Hoover one of Ohio's premier catfishing lakes, with a 2023 easing of harvest limits reflecting the population's strength, and walleye were reintroduced in 2019 after a 30-year absence.

The lake has also seen tragedy recur. A catfish-tournament director drowned when high winds swamped his boat in March 2023; two brothers capsized in cold water in March 2024, killing one; and divers have recovered the bodies of several missing people from the reservoir in recent years, including a young man found with his submerged car in December 2025, eight months after he went missing. Development pressure has followed the water too: in 2025 and 2026, Genoa and Berkshire townships each signed agreements allowing Columbus to annex its own reservoir land, and a home once owned by actor John Travolta sold in 2024 for $6.46 million, a central Ohio record.

The water

Hoover Reservoir exists for one reason: drinking water for Columbus. Water drawn from the lake is treated at the Hap Cremean Water Plant on Morse Road — opened in 1956 as the Big Walnut plant, expanded in 1969 and renamed in 1988 — and delivered into the city system, supplemented since the late 1960s by a pipeline from Alum Creek Reservoir for dry years. The reservoir's 190-square-mile watershed drains parts of Delaware, Morrow, Licking, Knox and Franklin counties, funneling into Big Walnut Creek, Little Walnut Creek and Duncan Run before reaching the pool.

Normal pool sits at 894 feet, held there since bascule gates were added to the spillway between 1970 and 1972, allowing storage up to 898 feet in wet periods; the original 1955 spillway crest, without the gates, was 890 feet. The reservoir's period of record includes a high of 898.95 feet (January 6, 2005) and a low of 868.58 feet (March 1, 1964). A U.S. Geological Survey gauge (03228400) has measured pool elevation since the mid-1950s, with a gap in published daily readings between late 2005 and August 2017; since then it has recorded pool levels continuously, showing a predictable seasonal pattern of near-894-foot summer pools falling through autumn to a December low before refilling each winter.

Sources

• Hoover Dam (Ohio) — Wikipedia)
• Galena, Ohio — Wikipedia
• Genoa Township, Delaware County — Wikipedia
• City of Columbus, Comprehensive Waterways Management Plan: Hoover (1990)
• City of Columbus water treatment history
• City of Columbus water supply historical timeline (PDF)
• 1948 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers survey, Big Walnut Creek, Ohio
• Village of Galena historical marker — HMdb
• Welcome to the Village of Galena (1966 pamphlet) — Delaware County Memory
• Genoa Township history
• Genoa Township cemeteries
• City of Columbus v. County of Delaware, 164 Ohio St. 605 (1956) — CourtListener
• City of Columbus v. Hirt (1954) — CourtListener
• Mosher, shore-erosion study, 1971 — Ohio State University
• USGS Circular 418, floods of January 1959
• Central College Presbyterian Church, 180th anniversary history (PDF)
• ODNR Hoover Reservoir fishing area
• Delaware Gazette, "Dam repairs ongoing at Hoover Reservoir" (2021)
• WOSU, "Columbus dips into water reserves as drought continues" (2024)
• Delaware Gazette, "Genoa Twp. approves annexation agreement" (2025)
• AOL/Columbus Dispatch, Hoover Reservoir home sale record (2024)
• Charley Project, Robert Stephen Mohney case